Howard Jacobson asks: who cares what happens in the wider world as long as
Lizzie Bennet ends up happy?

There has been much talk recently of Jane Austen being, in all but birth date, a thoroughly contemporary, sexy miss – “bridging time and custom,” in the words of a recent American critic, with her “smart-girl voice: peppery, wry, eye-rolling”. If that makes her sound like an American comedian with astigmatism and her own TV show, those are exactly the terms in which that critic goes on praising her, “so close to modern consciousness” she “could be gal pals with Tina Fey and Lena Dunham.”

So I thought I'd try testing her modernity on you, by asking if you can tell which of the following two passages was written by Jane Austen, 200 hundred years ago, and which by one or other of her gal pals of today.

1: “He moved the curtain aside and eyed me from top to toe. I think my face resembled a beetroot, so I turned, baring my back to him. I was terribly embarrassed, but I was also shocked by his brazenness. Oh, S--t. Oh, S--t. Oh, S--t. I anticipated his touch, I knew it was coming, but it was as if he was deliberately torturing me by dragging it out. My skin buzzed with expectations as he gently grasped the zip. He placed his other hand just above my bra strap and began to pull the zip up, slowly. Very slowly. Oh, holy c--p. I shouldn't be feeling this. I'm a married woman. I think that I flinched, and I think he noticed.”

2: “...they compressed themselves into the smallest possible space... and Captain Wentworth, without saying a word, turned to her, and quietly obliged her to be assisted into the carriage.

Yes, he had done it. She was in the carriage, and felt that he had placed her there, that his will and his hands had done it, that she owed it to his perception of her fatigue, and his resolution to give her rest. She was very much affected... This little circumstance seemed the completion of all that had gone before. Though condemning her for the past, and considering it with high and unjust resentment... still he could not see her suffer, without the desire of giving her relief. Holy s---, she thought.

I did consider reading you a passage from another contemporary novelist about a woman sitting up in a hotel bath and admiring the magnificent package the naked porter kept between his legs. But I thought it would be too obvious for an audience of this sophistication, Jane Austen never having used the word “package” in that sense.

We will say no more about this except to ask – what is so irresistible about being modern that we should wish it on Jane Austen? What does Persuasion lose, what does Pride and Prejudice lose, by having been written 200 years ago? (I don't need to tell you that the second of those extracts was from Persuasion. The first was from The Temptation by K.M. Golland.

Is Anne Elliot's agitation, on being helped into the carriage by Captain Wentworth, any less materially present to us, is her disarrangement any less sensually felt, because there's no mention of where Wentworth puts his hands in relation to her bra strap? Isn't the fact that he puts his hands on her at all, that “he had placed her there” – sufficiently electrifying to explain Anne Elliot's perturbation? Don't be misled by the decorousness of the language. If the spirit is perturbed, so is the flesh. “His will and his hands had done it”: an act of unlooked-for consideration, but also of confident authority – thrilling, if you like your sea captains masterful – performed by a man Anne regrets having long ago rejected, and whose feelings for her now she can only guess at. “Yes, he had done it.” The shock, the sense of fait accompli, Anne's total capitulation to Wentworth's decisiveness, are all the proof that the thing done is no small matter to her. Just because Anne Elliot's skin is not described as “buzzing with excitement”, doesn't mean it isn't.

The choice not to be more explicit – where on her body does he touch her, how hot are his fingers? – isn't governed by decorum only. It's as likely to be an artistic decision, too, keeping us wondering, as Anne herself must, what Wentworth's employment of his hands denotes, how far she dare allow her passion for him to be awakened. Name it, call it brazenness on one side and a hot flush on the other, and that's the end of sex as well as subtlety. The reason sex can be a disappointment in life is that it puts an end to all that isn't sex, all that might be, or is nearly, or doesn't in the end want to be, sex. And it's the same in literature. To word it is to kill it.

We need to position ourselves, here, between those who love winkling out venery and seduction in Jane Austen's novels, telling us which of the men who don't marry must be gay, and how much Mary Crawford was bound to know about the prevalence of buggery in the British Navy, and those, on the other, such as D H Lawrence and Mark Twain, who found her spinsterly and repugnant.

So no: in the matter of “eye-rolling” and zip-fiddling Jane Austen is not our contemporary. (Some of you might feel that in such matters you are not contemporaries yourselves.) But we needn't go to the other extreme and agree with Charlotte Bronte's breathy judgment that Jane Austen lacked passion, was indifferent to “what throbs fast and full”, and ignorant of “what the blood rushes through”, by which I can only suppose she means the veins.

There is, if we must talk like that, throb aplenty in Persuasion, as Anne Elliot's passivity and persuadability (the novel's subject) are put to the test. Only recall her response to Wentworth's relieving her of a troublesome child, “unfastening his sturdy little hands from around her neck,” and bearing him resolutely away: another small but somehow momentous event – hands on or near the body again, a physical act that demonstrates the strength of the one and the weakness of the other – in the aftermath of which Anne must flee to arrange her feelings – “ashamed of being so nervous, so overcome by such a trifle... it required a long application of solitude and reflection to recover her.”

You would have expected the author of Jane Eyre to recognise – in those fraught, self-castigating rhythms – the fast, full throb of passion; Anne's efforts to gain some ascendancy over which require a long application, not of cold showers, I grant you, but of solitude and reflection. As for “what the blood rushes through”, only think of Fanny Price in Mansfield Park, waylaid by an insistent Mary Crawford determined to plead her brother's cause – “I must speak to you for a few minutes somewhere” – “words,” and I quote, “that Fanny felt all over her, in all her pulses, all her nerves.”

Imagine being so anxiously alive to the saturant power of words that you don't just hear but feel them, all over you – as an assault on your nervous system and your body. How can one say of a writer whose characters can be so palpitatingly vulnerable, that she knows nothing of what the blood rushes through? Why, much of Persuasion, most of Pride and Prejudice, and the whole second half of Mansfield Park, is all bloodrush.

Bloodrush is not, however, incompatible with reflection. You can throb and wish you didn't. You can try to hold on to your senses even as you're losing them. I love the scene in Persuasion where Anne Elliot does what few educationalists have the courage to do today, and tells someone he's reading the wrong books. Having lost his fiancée, the lovelorn Captain Benwick, sits mooning over poems that reflect his mood. On the strength of a single afternoon's acquaintance, Anne risks saying she hoped “he did not always read only poetry” for “it was the misfortune of poetry, to be seldom safely enjoyed by those who enjoyed it completely; and that the strong feelings which alone could estimate it truly, were the very feelings which ought to taste it but sparingly.”

There are many reasons to be in love with Anne Elliot – her gracefulness of mind, her wistfulness – but for imperiously taking Benwick's education in hand, for daring to question what he reads, and for speaking like Dr Johnson, any man of sense would ask her to marry him.

It's probably Dr Johnson Anne has in mind when she goes on to recommend to Captain Benwick “a larger allowance of prose... such works of our best moralists... as occurred to her at the moment as calculated to rouse and fortify the mind by the highest precepts...”

I like “as occurred to her at the moment” because it suggests she could have come up with an even bigger list of exemplary moralists if she'd only had more time to compile it.

But just as you might be thinking that this sails a little too close to high-mindedness, the ship of irony is righted. “Anne could not but be amused at the idea of her coming to Lyme, to preach patience and resignation... nor could she help fearing, on more serious reflection, that, like many other great moralists and preachers, she had been eloquent on a point in which her own conduct would ill bear examination.”

It's rare in Jane Austen, a writer in whom irony never sleeps, for a piece of moralising to go unmoralized upon. It isn't only that she's learnt from Dr Johnson that we are never more foolish than when we're telling other people how to live, what makes her a novelist and not a writer of moral tracts is that she's forever alive to how time changes what we believe, how one event dramatically alters the complexion of another; nothing is once and for all true, everything is in flux: you cannot judge the lax, indulgent spaces of Mansfield Park until you have tried to breathe in that 'cloud of moving dust' that is Portsmouth, you should not deride another's susceptibility to flattery and not notice you are susceptible yourself. Irony isn't incidental to Jane Austen: it's the very functioning of her novelist's intelligence.

But it isn't nihilistic irony. Anne Elliot isn't finished as a moral being because she cannot herself live by the advice she dishes out. She's still right: some books do better rouse and fortify the mind than others.

We, however, might feel we can improve on her reading list by suggesting books she obviously couldn't – as for example, without being metafictional about it, the very novel she appears in. The novels of Jane Austen, we would argue, would even better serve Captain Benwick's needs for the reason that they rouse and fortify the heart as well as the mind.

Jane Austen would have no claim to being the first great English novelist if she wrote only romances, no matter with what elegance and wit. But we'd be lying if we didn't admit that our desire to see love triumph is a large part of what keeps us reading. Once we are immersed in Pride and Prejudice nothing matters more than that Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy resolve their misunderstandings, confess their affection and get together. And when I say nothing matters, I do mean NOTHING. Nothing else in the contemporaneous world outside the novel – not the Napoleonic Wars, not the condition of woman, not the Slave Trade in which the critic Edward Said accused her of being complicit by virtue of her near silence, a diversionary tactic that has led more academics into a cul-de-sac of footling irrelevance than even Tristram Shandy – and nothing else matters in our own life either. Our houses can fall down around our heads, a tsunami sweep through our cities, the people we love walk out on us – none of it's of consequence so long as the romantic fate of Elizabeth and Darcy remains in doubt. Who cares what happens to us so long as Lizzie Bennet ends up happy!

How is that achieved?

You could say: by virtue of Jane Austen being so a good story-teller... because she presents her characters with great vividness, makes us their familiars, paces and manages our hopes and apprehensions for them with such adroitness that we feel it's our own happiness that's on the line as much as theirs, and so on... but I think good storytelling is a description in which nothing is described. A good story is one that holds our interest and the question of why it holds our interest remains to be answered.

I think we can start an answer with the word “precarious”. In general we care about the happiness of characters in novels more sometimes than we care about our own because the compression of the narrative leaves no room for those slow accretions of disappointment and resignation that mark our real-life experiences. Time reconciles us to failure. We gradually learn to accept less than we once longed for. We forget unhappiness and even people we loved. But there isn't that time in even the longest novel. We see the end almost before we are done with the beginning. Which can make the dashing of hope more than we can bear. Love in a novel by Jane Austen is more precarious still because she feels it so. In her, opportunity is so rare and of such brief duration, and the forces against it – time, chance, social structure, age, above all temperament – so powerful, that we feel it to be near miraculous that happiness is ever achieved at all. You could say: it isn't. That alongside the fortunate accidents and reconciliations runs another, crueller story of happiness missed.

It's Jane Austen's poetic genius to let us just hear the whisperings of that bleaker story, telling of failure, and loss even, as she is persuading us that all will somehow be well. Thus we live on the edge of our nerves every time we read these novels, dreading that Darcy won't overcome his pride or Captain Wentworth his bruised feelings, no matter that we know, because we've read the books a hundred times, that they will. What keeps us anxious is that harsher and, to be truthful, more likely version, seeping through like damp.

Will we open Persuasion one day and find that it has finally prevailed and that Anne Elliot is left alone to reflect forever on her missed opportunity? So close is this to happening that even as she and Wentworth finally grasp their elusive happiness Anne must go to her room to make herself steadfast against “every thing dangerous in such high wrought felicity.” How fragile it all seems, what a permeation of sadness, as they walk together, the air between them cleared at last, pacing “their gradual ascent, heedless of every group around them, seeing neither sauntering politicians, bustling housekeepers, flirting girls, nor nursery maids and children” – in a sort of trance, in short, as though they are balancing their happiness on a tray that could so easily spill – a trance from which the dangerous world of noise, vicissitude and other people, must be shut out.

And this, too, I think is the spirit in which we follow the precarious progress of Jane Austen's lovers, wilfully oblivious to the bustling distractions of our world, afraid that we too might spill the tray.

But there is a further reason we are as gripped as we are by what on the face of it are just conventional romances in which obstacles are gradually overcome – and that is that Jane Austen invests her love stories with a value that is beyond even the lovers themselves to realise. They, reasonably enough, simply want the happiness of being with each other. We want that for them too, and receive as though they're thunderbolts every little proof that they are progressing to an understanding in which they will open up their hearts. When we discover that Mr Darcy is violently in love with Elizabeth – not moderately, but violently – my heart beats as violently as his, much as I try to still it.

Yet – or do I mean “for”? – more than the accident of their personal happiness is at stake.

Love matters in Jane Austen, it seems to me, because it stands for something more than itself. Just what that “more” is is hard to pin down, but we can begin to gesture at it by looking at the terms in which Harriet Smith's future with Robert Martin is described. Harriet is one of those women in Jane Austen who secure affection but not respect, so easily satisfied emotionally are they. True, it's Emma, always magnificently condescending to her “little friend”, who voices “no doubt of Harriet's happiness with any good tempered man”, but the action of the novel bears that judgment out. What marriage to this man will yield, however, is more than Harriet's bovine contentment. “With him, and in the home he offered, there would be the hope of more, of security, stability, and improvement. She would be placed in the midst of those who loved her, and who had better sense than herself; retired enough for safety and occupied enough for cheerfulness. She would be never led into temptation, nor left for it to find her out. She would be respectable and happy...”

That's almost like a vision of paradise, in which evil is shut out and every protection provided for a girl not quite bright enough to protect herself – a tableau of an ideal society where the defenceless are cared for and from which every social harm is kept at bay.

And this is just Harriet. Where the lovers are intelligent and capable of introspection, where they bring to love the highest demands of mutual understanding, and to marriage the highest expectations of felicity, what's promised is more paradisal still. Love in action in Jane Austen, when the lovers are able to measure how much is risked and how much might be won, is delight in conversation, disinterestedness, a respect for shared values, it is the operation of keen intelligence and sound judgment, attention to principle and morality, a contribution to the general good – not just one of the privileges of civilised society, and not just of benefit to the society in which it takes shape and flourishes (only think of the beneficence love confers on the entire community at the end of Emma), but an expression of civilisation itself.

This is not at all to say that love in Jane Austen is the sweetest expression of the prevailing social codes, a sort of conservatism with a kiss. Quite the opposite. If pride and prejudice stalk society, it's without either that Elizabeth Bennet and Darcy embark upon their union. They are not runaways like Lydia and Wickham, but the very fact that they're together after all that has stood in their way is a triumph over the governing conventions. Not a revolution, but a change. “I was... encouraged,” Darcy admits at last, “to care for none beyond my own family circle, to think meanly of all the rest of the world... You showed me how insufficient were all my pretensions to please a woman worthy of being pleased.” Pride and Prejudice doesn't quite address the question of the amelioration of man, but Jane Austen's subject is no less serious, and social betterment through happiness is no less her theme.

The philosopher Gilbert Ryle once wrote a strange little article about Jane Austen as, if not a philosopher exactly, then as moralist. “She wrote,” he said, properly rejecting all idea of her as a miniature-painter, “from a deep interest in some perfectly general, even theoretical questions about human nature and human conduct.” The abstract titles she gave many of her books – Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion – testify, he argues, to this deep interest in theoretical questions.

We, of course, will quickly respond that she is a novelist first, that those abstractions engage us only as they are embodied – exemplified or suffered by creatures of flesh and blood. Approach her work in too abstract or academic a spirit and we flatten the subtle contours of her work, those contradictions of feeling that count high among the pleasures of reading her. Take the blunder the critic Lionel Trilling makes, in his famously magisterial essay on Mansfield Park, when, in the course of a discussion of Jane Austen's irony – how she deploys it and also how much she mistrusts it – he describes the ironical Mr Bennet as “a moral nonentity.” I shudder when I read that. Not because I don't think Jane Austen judges Mr Bennet harshly for his aloof detachment, but because the judgment comes at a cost to her, and as a painful shock to us.

The scene in which Mr Bennet misreads his daughter's feelings and speaks with ignorant flippancy of matters that are near her heart, is a great one because it forces us, and Elizabeth, suddenly to look at him in a harsher light while not forgetting how we looked at him before. For a moment the novel seems to be shaken to its foundations. “Never had his wit been directed in a manner so little agreeable to her,” Elizabeth reflects, and that is no light matter given that she is a chip off the old block – with her own share of sharpness – to whom, hitherto, her father's wit has been very agreeable indeed. Does it take pain to herself for Elizabeth to understand the hurt a sardonic tongue can cause? Intimations of tragedy are felt hereabouts. Mr Bennet's sarcasm cruelly mortifies Elizabeth who loves him. But it has all along been undermining his other daughters too. And is an indicator of his own unhappiness, too.

Jane Austen the novelist, though, knows that we can love where we can't approve. Whatever the damage Mr Bennet's indifference wreaks, we still feel the sadness of his unfulfilled life, and feel it with too much of Elizabeth's affection, to bear hearing him called a moral nonentity. Such a final and icy condemnation points the difference between a critic and an artist.

But it's still important, I think, to sway to and forth on this, for while as novel readers and literature festival-goers we will instinctively put those of too abstract or intellectual a bent in their place, we run the risk of setting delight on a pedestal, and forgetting the serious purposes, in a great novelist, it serves. Hence the mess readers sometimes get themselves into when it comes to those moments – in the case of Mansfield Park, the entire novel – where the more callous, more waspish, and even more prim Jane Austen, as they see it, makes herself felt.

Let's deal with callous before we deal with prim. Though it's the most melancholy of her novels, Persuasion still contains the odd joke and indeed the odd scene that are not for the faint-hearted. Some critics, the majority of them men, die a little faced with such jokes as “the Musgroves had had the ill fortune of a very troublesome, hopeless son; and the good fortune to lose him before he reached his twentieth year.” A similar faintheartedness greets Jane Austen's pushing Louisa Musgrove, a possible pretender to Wentworth's affections, off the higher wall of the Cobb at Lyme Regis, to the excited curiosity, as she lies lifeless on the pavement below, of passing boatmen.

Well I cannot pretend that either of these is kind. One has a taste for eruptions of disorderliness or even murderousness or one doesn't. A keen wit has its downside in cruelty, as we see in Mr Bennet. But here is active, not indolent cruelty. And there is, it seems to me, exhilaration in it. Not a million miles away from the exhilaration we get from Rabelais when he is enjoying the cruelty that writing can unloose. The joke against the Musgrove boy is cruel all right, for the poor mother won't be thinking it's good fortune to have lost him; and it's gratuitous – nothing in the novels hinges on it. But don't knock gratuitousness. It can be an expression of an unfettered spirit.

Louisa's garrulous high spiritedness, on the other hand, granted the threat it poses to the happiness of a heroine we love, is of a sort we derive pleasure from seeing punished. A person can jump about too much. In our time Louisa Musgrove would never stop burbling about the Zumba classes she attends. If you don't think that's a good enough reason to kill her . . . well, Jane Austen is in two minds, but doesn't quite think so in the end. Louisa is spared and recovers to be the object of concerned devotion to that very Captain Benwick whose reading Anne Elliot tried in vain to improve. Which provides another occasion for Jane Austen to practise her asperity. “Captain Benwick and Louisa Musgrove! The high-spirited, joyous, talking Louisa Musgrove, and the dejected, thinking, feeling, reading Captain Benwick... What could have been the attraction? The answer soon presented itself... they had fallen in love over poetry.”

The joke, it has to be said, is on everybody here, including Anne who has spectacularly failed to change Benwick's reading habits. The zest of the satire awakens a sort of benediction in us. This is the way we are. If the circumstances are right – if the woman has nothing to do and the man has no one to love, and both have affectionate hearts – why not? Of her more demanding lovers Jane Austen expects greater discernment, and they, as a consequence, run a greater risk of unhappiness. But for other lovers easier to please, comedy of this sort releases us from the burden of disapproval. The cruelty enables us to forgive, and forget, them.

So? So, a little seasoning of wicked wit in an essentially good-hearted novel can be liberating. It buys faith in the good-heartedness. It show us that the writer is not good merely because she has never grasped the appeal of bad. And more than most English novelists – certainly the male ones – Jane Austen understands the invigoration that a breach of decorum can bring.

On the face of it, Mansfield Park poses different problems. Though here, too, those with the weakest stomachs are the most vocal. In the essay to which I've already referred, Lionel Trilling argues – rightly – that it's such readers' shortcomings that are to blame, not the novel's. “Yes, Mansfield Park is a great novel,” he writes, “its greatness being commensurate with its power to offend.”

The offence takes several forms. Fanny Price is too good to be true, the offended complain. She sermonises. She's a killjoy in love with a killjoy and the normally joyous Jane Austen seems to endorse them. (As a rule of thumb, when you hear someone talking about a novelist 'endorsing' you can discount what they have to say. Bank clerks endorse, novelists don't.) Not only is Fanny Price unlovable, the argument goes on, those characters we do like – Mary and Henry Crawford – are judged to be immoral. We are asked to like, that's to say, where we cannot, and condemn where we will not.

I am not of this party.

It's sometimes maintained that since for quick-wittedness Mary Crawford is hardly to be distinguished from Elizabeth Bennet, it's a mystery she should be condemned. Myself, I find the two women not at all alike. Whatever the quality of her public wit, it's the access we are given to Elizabeth's interior life that makes us care about her. We know how she reasons with herself. What it's like inside her head. Of course a novelist can load our sympathies one way or another by taking us in or keeping us out. Don't think me, or Jane Austen, unfeeling when I say that we know little of Mary Crawford's interior life because – compared to Elizabeth or Fanny – she doesn't have one. Of course she has something. We all go somewhere in our heads when the evening's brilliance is over. But Mary Crawford looks more out than in, is more resolute in action than in thought, is of a mind to get what she wants – “Matrimony was her object,” we are told – and in the meantime, of a mind, to pick up whatever pleases her just as long as it pleases her. “There was a charm, perhaps, in [Edmund's] sincerity... which Miss Crawford might be equal to feel, though not equal to discuss with herself.”

There's the key: – not equal to discuss with herself...

There is, we have to say, nothing that Elizabeth or Fanny is not equal to discussing with herself. For each, discussions of this private, anxious sort are as native as breathing. We are privy to their thoughts because theirs are dramas of conscience and self-questioning, and Mary's quite simply isn't. You could say that this, for Jane Austen, is the difference between a serious person and an irresponsible one: not the vigour of their conversational skills, not their social agreeableness, not their wit – have we not seen the limits of wit in Mr Bennet? – and not their views on ordination either, but the degree to which they think about the consequences of their actions, the grave attention they give to submitting what they feel to examination.

“The unexamined life is not worth living,” said Socrates, and those Jane Austen cares for most are all prize-winning self-examiners.

To the degree that she fails of scrutinising herself, is Mary Crawford not serious. Where morality is the issue, it isn't sensuality that damns her, damns her brother and damns the Bertram sisters, but an incapacity for introspection. Julia lacks “knowledge of her own heart”; Maria shuts her eyes while she looks and closes her understanding while she reasons; Henry Crawford is not in the “habit of examining his own motives”, and even the grave Sir Thomas is “too little accustomed to serious reflection”. Serious reflection, note, is not to be confused with a sober demeanour. I just used the word “damned”. It is not, I think, unfounded. Sober or relaxed, the denizens of Mansfield Park dance as in some glittering circle of hell, in brilliant formations of self-ignorance and, at last, self-torture. Only think of Maria sequestered at last with Mrs Norris, “somewhere remote and private, where, shut up together with little society, on one side no affection, on the other, no judgment, it may be reasonably supposed that their tempers became their mutual punishment.”

It would not be far fetched to call that Dantesque.

A characteristic of people who aren't serious is an incapacity to understand why other people are. Thus, when it comes to the notorious theatricals, the overwhelming view is that “it's a little amusement among ourselves” against which no objection can be raised. “What a piece of work here is about nothing,” proclaims Mrs Norris when Fanny refuses to participate. That's another characteristic of people who aren't serious – they find nothing where others find something.

Jane Austen would not have given the Bertram sisters as good a phrase as “scrupulousness run mad” if she hadn't felt the force of that charge. The wonderful drama of these chapters relies partly on our feeling the allure of flippancy, that common resistance to rectitude when it threatens to spoil a good time. It isn't easy to take a stand on principle where people are intent on fun and laughter fills the room. The price principle always risks is prudery. Scrupulousness run mad – could the Bertram girls be right this time?

Without rehearsing the arguments against the play, these are marvellous scenes, by turns comic and upsetting, farcical and fraught, because holding out against the fun-loving is shown to be hard. To be a sociable being is to accept give and take, and it isn't nice to be thought a prig. Later on, faced with another choice between what's right and what's easy, Fanny is described as having “all the heroism of principle”. We shouldn't deny her the tribute. Where flexibility is deemed to be a social virtue, it takes a lonely courage to be stiff.

That life would be easier for her if she were a little more flexible herself, is what the novel is about. But this doesn't mean that all aspects of her withdrawn reticence are given an easy ride. It is beyond Jane Austen not to poke fun at her finely wrought heroine, as when mention is made of her “favourite indulgence of being suffered to sit silent and unattended to.”

There is a perversity of self-abnegation in Fanny that a later writer might have pursued into the wilds of neurosis, but nothing strikes me as lost by Jane Austen's simply keeping ironic watch. In fact, given the number of tests of character and resolve that are heaped on Fanny, she does well to emerge as sound of mind as she does. But the jokes at the expense of her lack of robustness – what Fanny herself recognises as “the helplessness and fretfulness of a fearful temper” – keep coming. Her return to Portsmouth is an agony which at times Jane Austen almost seems to torture her with – oh, for those big rooms now that alarmed her when she first arrived at Mansfield Park! Oh for that formality of manners! In the rude din of Portsmouth, where she is too shrinking and supine to be of use, she almost becomes another Lady Bertram. And as for the number of times she nearly faints away, either with shame, apprehension, discomfort, or just the fainterliness of her own nature – only a novelist utterly secure in her own comic touch, and in the value of her heroine, could ever have chanced them.

If civilisation itself seemed to wait on the happy outcome of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy's marriage, how do we describe what trembles in the balance as Mansfield Park reaches its climax? The infidelities and adulteries might make us talk of moral chaos, but Jane Austen's language is even stronger – “too horrible a confusion of guilt, too gross a complication of evil, for human nature, not in a state of utter barbarism, to be capable of!”

I said Jane Austen's language, but in dramatic truth it's Fanny's. “The horror of a mind like Fanny's, as it received the conviction of such guilt, and began to take in some part of the misery that must ensue, can hardly be described.”

“A mind like Fanny's,” and we know by now what it is about that mind that Jane Austen values. Its irreducible seriousness. Elizabeth Bennet could have brought us to the portal of this misery, but it has needed an altogether more anxious mind to take us across. Jane Austen's is the sort of intelligence in which comedy is never far away. Indeed comedy is the prime mode of her intelligence. How brave of her, then, to have taken up abode, this time, in the imagination of an unplayful, non-ironic person; what a brilliant stroke of art to dare us to be offended by someone who feels the terribleness of things with such solemnity. It is as though she is daring us to be offended by seriousness itself.

Accept that challenge or not, there are few more consummately funny writers in English than Jane Austen, and even fewer who are so serious of purpose. The two, as you don't need me to tell you, are mutually dependent.

“If there is any one action or relation in my life which is and always has been profoundly serious,” George Eliot wrote in a letter, “it is my relation to Mr Lewes...” (Mr Lewes, of course, being her lover.) That the novelist considered the most serious of them all should attach so high a value, in the scale of seriousness, to love, only confirms what we have been saying about love in Jane Austen. Who are Lizzie Bennet and Mr Darcy that we should go on attaching such value to them over the years? They are lovers, that is who.

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